1363397 - Random FireFox 53 crashes corrupt SessionStore JSON, yanking sites' icons from loaded tabs as a result

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Session Restore, defect)

Description

[User Dderss]

Attachment: FireFox 53's session gets corrupted after a crash.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Build ID: 20170413192749

Steps to reproduce:

Regular browsing that ends up with different crashes.


Actual results:

Besides the usual FireFox message that tells that it is sorry the current tab has crashed and offering either to close it or reload it, in all of loaded tabs sites' icons disappear, as seen in the attached screenshot. They never re-appear until I manually click on every of such tabs. This happens no matter what type of crash has happened (various signatures for known/investigated crash reports) but the result is the same. 

I have no browser extensions that do external session management and, hence, could potentially tamper with the way how FireFox manages SessionStore JSON or its serialization/synchronization.

I am trying to do additional testing in a pure environment, but it is not easy since thanks to the stability improvements in FireFox I can not quickly come to a crash.

**QUESTION:** is there a quick predictable way to crash FireFox so it's main content process would be killed and I would see the aforementioned message that my current tab has crashed? It would make my testing much easier. Thanks in advance.


Expected results:

If a crash has occurred, SessonStore JSON object should not get corrupted, sites' tabs should never disappear from any tabs. Not at least from the background tabs that have nothing to do with the current tab.

Comment 1

[User Dderss]

And it is not a new issue, by the way: this screenshot is from about a year ago:
https://bug1261315.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8761072

Comment 2

[YF (Yang)]

You can terminate content process to trigger the tab crashes screen.

I did not see non-expected behaviors, the current content processes plan is not an process per site or tab.


You said "SessionStore JSON" is the tabs and favicons on screen? If yes, it is not a data corruption bug.

Comment 3

[User Dderss]

Thanks. It is both on screen and off screen. Whatever tabs I managed to click while working with in my session (so they would become loaded versus their usual "click-to-load" unloaded state) has lost its icon, and it stays continueusly this way no matter how many times I restart, so this is, indeed, a Session Restore corruption, not some rendering issues.

Comment 4

[YF (Yang)]

WFM in Fx54.0.1.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Reporter,
Do you still encounter this issue on newer versions?

Comment 6

[User Dderss]

Attachment: FireFox 65-68 yanking site favicons after certain crashes.png

This type of crash is rare nowadays and not reproducible. But I still got it a few months ago and since then I have sites' favicons in the tabs yanked even though I migrated to a new profile (thanks to account synching) shortly before that -- so it definitely was not an issue of an old corrupt profile, it gets corrupted anew due to a certain type of crashes.

The most annoying thing is that I have a lot of tabs, so it would take forever to manually click on every tab to reinitialize the favicon data. And I can not disable "click-to-load" option since otherwise, I will get an OOM crash. I wish there would be some script fix this.

I wonder why the SessionStore is so weak in terms of retaining this type of data and why FF's engine does not properly check its integrity and does not try to repair it automatically.

Can you please tell me who is dealing with this area among developers? How can I ask them to look at the issue? I know am certainly not the only one with the favicons disappearing issue. Maybe someone is already working on this.

Thanks in advance.